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Amherst Sculptor Will Create a New Work in Chile

AMHERST, Mass.-DeWitt Godfrey, sculptor and assistant professor of fine arts at Amherst College, has been asked to participate in the II Sculpture Simposium Ciudad Empressarial to be held at the Galeria Artespacio in Santiago, Chile from November 20 to December 4, 2000. Godfrey will create a sculpture in iron, to further the symposium's wish to "bring sculpture to public spaces" in Chile.

Godfrey's most recent installation is at the "Once Removed" show at the Socrates Sculpture Garden in Long Island City, N.Y. through September. It consists of 600 ribbons of corten steel, 6 inches wide and from 3 to 10 feet long, all held together by 4,500 stainless steel bolts to form a 12 foot high cylinder lying on its side. This is supported by an internal scaffolding that, when removed, allows the steel to fall and fold. Graceful curves result in the solid metal. Noting that some of the works in "Once Removed" resembled "fallen monuments," Roberta Smith in The New York Times wrote that "Godfrey's large, curving horizontal steel sculpture suggests an equal, if more abstract, state of collapse."

When Godfrey constructed a similar object in fallen steel for the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston two years ago, it was described in the catalog as a " strange, collapsed, and formless deconstruction of itself." Godfrey remarked at the time, "These pieces have a role in their own making." Godfrey plans to create a "similar dynamic structure" in Santiago-although it might be more accurate to say that he plans to allow a similar structure to create itself.

DeWitt Godfrey was born in Houston in 1960. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1982 and an M.F.A. from the Edinburgh College of Art, Heriot Watt University in Scotland in 1996. He has taught at Amherst College since 1999.